1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique that is applied to a printing environment where multiple printing devices are connected to a network and that distributes a print job among the multiple printing devices to attain distributed printing.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a printing system that has become widespread recently, multiple printers are connected to one identical network and each user selectively uses the multiple printers. A technique of distributed printing is also proposed (for example, JP2002-215369A). The distributed printing technique distributes a print job including a plural number of copies to be printed to multiple printers and shortens the total printing time by parallel processing. In the distributed printing system, a print server exclusively used for distributed printing on the network generally controls the destinations of distribution of the print job and the number of printed copies.
The conventional technique requires a large-scaled system including a server to attain distributed printing, and has some drawbacks discussed below. The first problem is a difficulty in management of the total number of printed copies, when some error arises in any of the printers in the course of printing. For example, it is assumed that printing of 100 copies is required and that each of two printers takes charge of printing 50 copies. When an error arises in one of the printers in the course of printing, the user is required to count the number of copies printed by the printer with the error, calculate a residual number of copies to be printed, and generate a print job including the residual number.
The second problem is that a print job is possibly distributed to printers that are located at distant places, since the printers having closer network addresses may not be physically closer. This may impose a heavy load of collecting the resulting prints on the user.